Sheep Guarding Llama

I am home alone today and tomorrow but that isn’t too bad.  Plenty of work to do and I know that the family will be home on Saturday.  I went into the office today.

For lunch I met up with Chris and we hit Redneck Heaven and hung out.

Nothing much going on at home.  Got home after work and just spent a quiet evening at the house.  Tomorrow night is my last night at home alone, hopefully for a very long time.

How did August sneak up on us like this?  I had no idea August was lying in wait to bounce.  I was caught quite by surprise.

Today is my work from home day this week and I am spending it out at the lake with the family.  I got up early and took the HP Folio 13 out to the veranda and worked from there for the morning.  It was warm but not horrible.  I made it until around noon before it was just too warm to be able to stay out there.  Then I had to move inside to the air conditioning to be able to keep working.  The Folio was getting really hot trying to work out in the 100 degree or higher heat.

Today is scheduled to be the hottest day of the week with temperature hitting one hundred and nine degrees out on the lake and tomorrow as high as one hundred and fourteen up in Gainesville, Texas!

We had a good time out at the lake and I got to see my girls quite a lot.  I drove back home in the late evening leaving around ten at night so that it was nearly midnight when I got back to the house in Carrollton.  That was a long day.

Now I just have two days at home alone before the family returns on Saturday morning.  That is not so bad.  I can handle two days alone during the week.

Went to the office today. Nothing special there.  At lunch I ran home and did as much “taking care of the house” as I could so that I would not need to come back to the house after work.

After work, as soon as I could get out which was about five thirty, I got in the Chevy Spark (it is weird being an all GM family for the first time since I was a teenager) and headed out towards Canton, Texas and the lake house.  I got stuck in rush hour traffic, however, and the drive ended up being over two hours long even though I was coming from the office which is, in theory a few minutes closer to the lake house than our house in Carrollton is.

I got out to the lake house at a decent hour and got quite a while to hang out with Luciana before she went to bed.  Liesl was so busy playing with her cousins and going out on the boat that I really did not get to see her much at all.   Luciana and I hung out quite a bit, though.  It was too hot outside so we were inside most of the time and watching weird reality TV either where people buy junk or they trade junk.  Television sure is weird these days.

I have a new article up on SMB IT Journal today: The Windows Desktop Release Cycle.

I woke up early, quarter after five this morning.  Got a little work done around the house and got into the office nice and early.  It’s great having the Spark to use for commuting.

This is going to be one hot week.  One hundred and six degrees most days with one hundred and eight expected on Wednesday.  Sheesh.  I requested Wednesday as my work from home day so that I can drive out to the lake house and spend the day with the family there.  That will break up the week nicely, two days alone twice.  Everyone will be back home Saturday morning.

I went home at lunch today so that I could get to work on the carpets.  Boy is there a lot to do while the family is gone.  My goal, and this is pretty ambitious, is to clean all of the carpets in the entire house.  Well, not my office carpet, but all of the others.  There is a lot of carpet to cover and I want to do a combination of spot cleaning and Rug Doctoring.  I got the Rug Doctor back from the Grices over the weekend so I am prepared for that.  Maneuvering furniture and getting enough time for everything to dry out is going to be the real challenge.

Quiet evening at home alone tonight.  Did not get very much done.  This is my only evening to myself as tomorrow I will be heading out to the lake house after work.  I had thought about going out tonight but decided that I was feeling lazy and should just stay in and relax.  So I did.

Bennie and Francesca got up at seven this morning and took the boat out on the lake for an hour and a half.  There are still many hours to go before the engine is really ready for use.  They were gone before Dominica and I got up, which was more like seven thirty.

Dominica and I spent the morning out on the veranda sipping our coffee and visiting with family as they awoke and came outside.  I did some reading on my Kindle.  It was warm but not too hot early in the morning.  But that did not last very long.

By mid morning it was too hot to remain on the veranda so I went inside onto the couch and used my laptop from there.  I got a lot of work done today as I didn’t want to leave the couch very much due to the heat.  Mostly working on a FreeBSD server.

Luciana spent much of the day inside.  She ran around the house a lot.  She likes having the kids around.  She and Clara are starting to play together a lot.

Liesl I barely get to see at all as she is so busy that she doesn’t want to spend time with her daddy when all of her cousins are there.  She went out boating again today.  She loves the boat.  Francesca got an awesome picture of her driving the boat standing on the captain’s seat.  So adorable.

All of the family from the Ft. Worth area came out today and we celebrated Gavin’s birthday.  He is three today.

I left the lake house around five this evening to drive back home.  Luciana was winding down and Liesl had gone out for a long boat ride so I really wasn’t going to see much more of either of them tonight but I was really tired and the drive back is about an hour and a half.

On the drive back I finished listening to the book “Mass Effect: Retribution” which I was supposed to have read before playing Mass Effect 3 but did not get the chance to.  I’ve now read all three of the main books and played all three of the games.  There is a fourth book but I’ve heard that it doesn’t really fit well with the others.  I’ll check it out at some point but at least the books that go with the games are done.

I started reading the ninth Stephanie Plum novel on the drive back.  Hard to get into it, though, the eighth one was so boring.

I got back home and spent the evening at the computer in the play room doing relatively little.  I FaceBooked a bit, did some FreeBSD stuff, watched some dumb National Lampoon’s movie on Netflix and stayed up too late.